


like real people do

by JoanofArc



Series: darejones [5]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Introspection, They love each other, also religious imagery, and it hurts, but when it doesn't it's beautiful, darejones owns my soul, happy new years matt and jessica deserve each other, it's basically a mess because uh. ain't that the ship name?, there are so many myth references in this one be warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 06:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17259629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoanofArc/pseuds/JoanofArc
Summary: on loving a martyr. or, matthew murdock bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. jessica jones knows what it's like to have blood on her hands.





	like real people do

**Author's Note:**

> almost all titles from this series of one shots are from hozier songs, because there's not one artist to depict darejones like hozier. fight me on that. also, this relies heavy on introspection and has literally no dialogue. i don't know how it happened, but it did. enjoy anyway <3

she thinks she knows what divinity tastes like by now. (take, eat, this is my body, and this is my blood, and this is my soul tattered, ripped in two.) it's graveyard dirt and holy wine, it's kissing the sun over and over again and expecting not to get hurt.

everyone loves a good tragedy. they're written in golden ink over history's leather-thick skin, like all the deaths meant nothing. icarus throws himself into the ocean, kisses death, but death runs bony fingers on the inside of his wrists and says, 'child, you have too much fire in you to seek out the darkness.' says, 'you will be remembered not for who you are, but what you failed to be.' so he tells death to fuck off and gathers his own feathers and waxen threads and dives right back in. baptismal rebirth, when the flame strips away the layers of porcelain to reveal the muscle beneath. and yet he is so daringly mortal, in this body cage chipped at the edges. like his bones haven't been washed clean and sun bleached, washed ashore to litter the ground like gravestones. the heartbeat stutters in echo to heartbreak. there is only so much self-destruction the body can take. there is only so much pain the soul can hold within itself. 

she knows how the story goes. in another world, his tongue would not be coated in blood. when the angel with fire in his eyes asks his plummeting body where he is going, the syllable are broken, as if punched out of his lungs: home, home, home. it is not the fortitude of the heroes that ties him to this distant shore. there is nothing heroic in the black and blue he paints himself in, rubbing mud across feverish flesh to ground himself into the ether. it's a religious submission, above the penitent, if not intertwined with the foolish enthusiasm of the martyr.

sometimes, she looks at him and sees her own reflection in the silver mirror.

subterfuge to madness, when silver mirror grants the warrior three wishes. three heads adorned in serpent. three lives lost, three hearts held in the palm of a trembling hand. grecian air carries too harshly the scent of salt. infused with the tears of those lost at sea, driven to jump overboard by disembodied voices promising them forever. the church groans with the wind. this body-temple was built to withstand the harshest of storms but not for softness. when fingers glide across the spine, counting vertebrae, she does not know how to bow under the ghost pressure without breaking. there is a voice at the back of her head, whispering of oblivion. sometimes oblivion sounds like a siren’s song, and each step across the wooden deck brings her closer to the edge. other times, it sounds like a swan’s dying breath.

the aegis stare back in the eye of the mortal daring to face the monster. what they don’t say is how the monster was once girl, before the gods have taken her broken body and gave her a serpent’s curse. that the beating heart inside her chest was once filled with more than this anger. inevitable doom, when they look upon medusa and her gruesome visage and see only _death_. see only the parts of her that are broken, hear only the whispers of how her hands are stained red. and the red drips, crimson and carmine and staining, down on the altar. they don’t dress her in white. her death is not the passage of the worthy in the afterlife, but rather, just another trial to pass for the boy to become man. sheath your sword inside her and watch her bleed, son of man. her body, yours for the taking.

but matthew is not perseus. he does not take the dagger to her throat, does not leave her gasping and clawing and drinking in the last droplets of air until the chest ceases in its struggle. and maybe this, his kindness disguised as razor sharp fangs, is even more cruel. because he speaks of forgiveness and she shatters just as fast. falters, breaks. she does not know how to pull herself back together when there’s nothing but her pain to defend. identity lost amidst the purple hyacinths in bloom. he gives his gentleness freely, as if it has not been abused by so many and she is undeserving of the holy light radiating from his smile. cannot touch divinity with the weight of her sins still heavy on her shoulders.

and yet he's never seen her as anything but worthy of softness. it's what builds her up and shatters her, phantasmagorical tendrils wrapped around her bones to stitch them back together. he sees through her, with the startling precision of an unseeing oracle, of someone who had touched the stars and stained his fingers of the dust.

his blood is red and when she pushes her fingers between his shoulder blades she doesn’t find feather. son of man, scorched by deserts and drowned by rain. there is nothing sanctimonious in the way his knees bleed where he knelt too long in the gravel, and his shoulders are quivering under the weight of the world. (concept: you shoulder the load yourself, push him from the path of the vultures so they may devour your heart instead. prometheus only meant to domesticate the fire.) he walks the fine line between real and something existing beyond the threads of time, like the universe has chewed him up and spit him up howling. he hides the halo behind her back, like it hasn't been a weight to hold him down on the oceanic floor, and she pretends it doesn't cut her hands open when she reaches for it, tries to rip it apart. the problem with martyrs is that their soul is infused with so much sacrifice it's washed in amaranthine. pomegranate juice dripping down the corner of her lips when she kisses him.

and he says his hail marys in the crook of her neck. the closest thing she has ever been to divinity. crucified for the sins of the many, if she reaches for his palms, will she feels the holes made by rusty nails? the snake whispers of strawberries apples and summer sweet cherries, but all she can taste is the pain. she thinks saints shouldn't sink their teeth into mortal girls' thighs, but then he grips at her hips and she stops thinking altogether. the problem with martyrs is that they'll see through glass spun bones and look straight into the sinner's heart. or maybe that's just **him** , unrepentant, glorious, so, so easy for her to love.

there are things, however, he cannot see, and she watches the way that truth stands like a brand across his skin, knows the way his sorrow feels in the dip of her collar bone.

_tell me_ , he asks, begs, like she's his salvation and he can't breathe without her, and she starts off with her hair, how it's black, black, black, like the darkness he's surrounded with, and she thinks that maybe this is why they fit so well, murdock and jones, because she's seen the ghosts crawling beneath his skin, knows them by name now. it feels like home, like no other home felt like, how she's breaking his ribs so she can climb inside, so she can curl herself around his beating heart. _tell me_ , he says again, and she thinks maybe she should, but the confession gets ripped from inside her throat, and she's falling along with it.

the problem with loving a martyr, is that it always ends with blood.

it begins with the cadence of someone older than time itself. it's an odd sort of sempiternal existence, an odd sort of perennial awareness. with two heartbeats beating in tandem, the gravitational pull of two celestial bodies meant to collide. ( _it's like you see into my soul_ , she tells him once, and he laughs and laughs because she's seen him for all that he is and more. _it's like you're running through my blood._ )

thing is... thing is, jessica jones has had enough of symbols. of half digested stories of heroism shoved down her throat through the beak of a dying bird. trish had wanted her to be a hero, and daredevil wears the mantle of heroism like the broken ribs and scars littering his body are badges of honour, but matt isn't. matt is just matt when he holds her like she might break if he presses too hard, when he laughs so hard there are cracks in the facade he tries to shroud himself in. and yet he's a little bit of both, lawyer and protector saint of hell's kitchen and all of its damned, and she's never seen him as one thing or the other. he's all tangled strings she doesn't want to uncoil, because there's a softness in his razor sharp smile and a sharpness in the softness of his voice. he's both, and neither. she's both and neither too. 

loving a symbol is scary, but so is loving matt. different, somehow, like she's slipped down the slippery edge into an abyss and she's falling, unknown, in the way all wonderful things are. and yet, she has never known that word, and sometimes, she shies away from his touch like it'll burn her. this jumbled mess of unbeing, unlearning, unbecoming, of brushing away the dust which had clung to her flesh since before the flood and letting his starburst scorch at her skin. sometimes, she wonders if he knows he touches her so gently it moves through her skin, as if she were but mere quixotic mirage, if he knows this love he has ignited into her chest will choke her up. there is something growing inside of her, pulsating, and it itches. she wants to tear herself apart to rip it out, see what's been etched into it, and yet she somehow knows that it's going to be him. the thing with loving matthew murdock is that there's never quite enough of herself she can give, so she has to swallow both feather and smile and try not to choke on the taste of resurrection. she's getting better at it. she's done running away from it.

and honestly, there are worse fates than this. surely, _surely_ someone is out there rolling their eyes towards the high heaven, because this isn’t a tragedy, it isn’t, it’s two orphans trying to find a home amidst the wreckage left in the wake of monumental loss, and only finding each other. 


End file.
